


Instinct and Decisions

by Zoadgo



Series: Merry Ficmas! [4]
Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, F/M, Fix-It, Post 2X06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:36:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5497292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassandra’s last memory is of being on the verge of death in a subterranean lab. The shallow grave that she wakes up in is very definitely not there, and she follows a vague urging in her chest, trying to find her way back to her group.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Instinct and Decisions

Cassandra wakes up from a troubled sleep with a gasp that fails to draw any oxygen into her lungs. Her mouth fills with something solid and gritty, and she panics, struggling with all her strength to free her limbs. She gains very little ground, only succeeds in working herself into an even greater panic as her lungs burn and the grit gets into her eyes before she clenches them shut. She tries to breathe through her nose and finds that just as unsuccessful as breathing through her mouth.

She reins herself in with the iron will that had allowed her to survive Black Summer. Although she trembles and feels like she might vomit, she stops struggling. She uses her tongue to push the solid matter from her mouth and then clenches her teeth together, now that she’s not quite as panicked, tasting the dirt on her tongue. Dirt, confinement, no air, that leads Cassandra's mind to one place.

Buried alive.

The thought, quite likely correct, almost sends her back into a frenzy, but she grinds her teeth together and tries to think. She doesn’t know how long she can survive without air from this point, she’s already desperate for it, but she doesn’t seem to be lightheaded or blacking out, so she may have a chance if she doesn’t freak out.

First step, find out which way is probably up. With the weight of earth crushing down on her, it’s not like she can rely on which way gravity is pushing her, and she can’t hope that she was buried face up. She presses her hands and arms carefully in each direction, wiggling her fingers slightly to try and create a pocket for soil fall into. And it works, dirt tickles the backs of her hands, and Cassandra knows which way is down.

Next, head up. Her hands seem to have the most leeway, and Cassandra just hopes she’s not buried too deep. Although her lungs continue to desperately remind her that she needs oxygen quite quickly, she doesn’t feel any real negative effects from the lack of it. Her fingers curl into claws that feel almost natural, and she works away at the soil around them, the movement freeing her wrists slightly, and then her arms. With a small amount of room to move, it becomes dramatically easier, and Cassandra punches up with one of her hands.

In accordance with her hopes and in contradiction to what she had thought would actually happen, her hand reaches into free air, and she can feel a raindrop splatter on one of her fingers, a lonely harbinger that her task may get more difficult soon. She wants to simply pull herself from the dirt, but that proves more difficult than she’d thought it would be, trying to move all the dirt from her torso and head by leverage. So she completely frees her arms and then uncovers her head.

Cassandra gasps in air, coughing a little on the soil that she inhales along with it, and hesitantly opens her eyes, trying to avoid getting grit in them as well. The sky above her is a cool grey, likely the clouds on the edges of a storm, and she redoubles her efforts to clear the rest of her body. She does not like the idea of digging herself out of mud.

It becomes even easier once Cassandra gets her shoulders and chest free of the soil. Then she can sit up and drag her legs out of her shallow, would-be grave, which she stumbles away from with nausea biting at her throat.

Someone had tried to kill her, and had almost succeeded. That’s the only explanation for why she would be buried without a hole in her head. If her group had needed to mercy her, which she knows they didn’t given the fact that she’s still thinking, and she had been in possession of the last bullet with which to kill herself, they might have buried her, but she wouldn’t have woken up. And if she’d been buried as dead without being mercied, she wouldn’t have woken feeling this mentally clear. She would have been a Z.

So what happened? What can’t she remember, and why hadn’t her group found her? She knows that Tommy never would have gone on without her, she’d forced him to do so back at the lab. The last thing she remembers is the lab, and Murphy saying goodbye to her, and… Had he kissed her? She remembers him leaning towards her, and then nothing, so maybe he’d decided to take advantage of an almost dead girl. Well, she’ll slap him for it when she finds the group again.

The rain begins to fall faster, the sky shifting into darker shades, and Cassandra welcomes it. It rinses the grime from her near death experience after her, and as she stumbles off in a random direction that feels right to her, hoping to find some sign or road that might lead her to Tommy and the others, she looks down at her clothes with distaste.

The red jacket isn’t bad, although she vaguely wonders how much of that red is blood, but beyond that she looks like a particularly cheap stripper. She had never worn that much skintight gold clothing before in her life, why was she wearing it now? She feels naked with so much exposed skin that zombies could easily sink their teeth into, so she zips up the jacket and walks onward as the rain turns into a proper downpour.

Although the storm that seems strangely intense does a good job of cleaning Cassandra from her burial, she quickly acquires a new coat of mud as it passes, which only attracts dust as the paths she walks on begin to dry. It doesn’t take long before she’s caked in grime again, and maybe she gives into it and covers her stupidly gold skimpy clothing in mud at one point. She doesn’t like standing out quite that much, even though she has yet to see a zombie since she’d crawled out of the earth.

She also hasn’t found food or any water except for that one rainstorm, and though her throat is sore and dry and her stomach aches, she still feels just as strong as she walks on, following the insistent urging in her chest for no reason other than she’s got nothing else to go on. It’s like when she was buried and starved for air, yet still going on living and thinking just fine. It’s odd, but Cassandra decides not to question it. Maybe her body has somehow adapted better to starvation and dehydration, she has no idea what might have been done to her in the time that she can’t remember.

The first zombies that Cassandra sees, a few days later, is a town full of them. She skirts around it, avoiding the town as best she can, and she swears that one of them looks at her, but it doesn’t follow her and she decides not to question that either. Maybe there’s easier food in the town, or maybe her coat of mud and ick made it think that she was a Z too. Cassandra leaves the zombie town and the oddly noose-less gallows at one end of it behind her and continues on in her stumbling onward.

She finds a bridge over an impressive river, which she ducks down to for a quick bath and a few mouthfulls of blissfully cold water. She crosses it in order to continue on her vaguely urged path, no longer thirsty, but still hungry. Her hunger doesn’t grow as the days tick by in single minded focus, although her thirst does gradually return. She figures by now that she should be blacking out or dead from starvation. She has no idea why she’s still just annoyingly hungry.

As Cassandra skirts town and narrowly avoids zombies, scavenging for weapons and food, the latter of which there never seems to be any of, she tries to make sense of her situation. When she fails to do that at all, she thinks of the group and wonders what they’re up to. Maybe they’ve made it to California, maybe Murphy has betrayed him with the zombie powers he seemed to be developing. Maybe he went full Z and they had to mercy him.

Much of the time, her thoughts turn to Tommy. She wonders if he’s hit 10,000 zombies, what his current number is at if not. She thinks about him having told his pre-Z name to someone else, and she feels jealousy coil around her ribs. It’s not like she has any claim on him, and he probably doesn’t even know if she’s still alive, but still, she doesn’t like the idea of him having the bond they’d been forming with someone else.

Maybe he knows what happened to her, and maybe it was something bad. Doubt begins to spread into her veins with every footstep as she considers the possibility that in her missing memory, she’d done something to him. Maybe that’s why he’d left her buried there, why he hadn’t tried to find and save her. Cassandra hopes that Tommy will be happy to see her, if she ever manages to find the group again, but she fears that he won’t be.

The urging grows stronger as the days pass, and Cassandra finds out the hard and terrifying way that zombies ignore her when she stumbles upon a new, long haired zombie in a small town who looks at her and then stumbles off. She hunts him down and pikes him anyway, because that’s just too weird and she doesn’t like it. It’s wrong for a zombie to not want to eat her.

It’s a few more days travelling on the road before Cassandra comes across a not uncommon sight, a car graveyard of abandoned vehicles. She wander through it, the feeling in her core undeniable as it draws her onwards, and then she hears voices. Familiar voices, bickering comfortably about which vehicle to pick.

Cassandra can’t help but run towards what she has to admit might be a hallucination of her group, caused by the lack of food and rest. She slows down as she grows closer to them, not wanting to be shot before they see who she is, and she steps around one more rusted up old truck, and stands still in shock at the very real sight of her wasteland-family. 

Warren is rolling her eyes at some new guy who smirks at her, and Cassandra wonders what the relationship there is. Doc and Tommy are elbow deep in a caravan, telltale sounds of duct tape being applied emanating from the engine. Mack is nowhere to be seen, and Addy is keeping watch with her back to Cassandra. Murphy is lounging on the roof of a car, facing towards her but looking back at the group and grumbling about how hungry he is. He finishes his complaints and looks in front of him, and he spots her.

“Cassandra?” There’s something in his voice, something in the tone of his shock that reminds Cassandra of a person getting their pet back when they thought the had lost it. They hadn’t been close enough for him to care about her disappearance, she’s sure of it.

“Not funny,” Tommy grumbles, still paying attention to the engine.

Murphy gets off of the hood of the car, and Warren and the new guy look over as if they’re going to scold him, but then they see her and shock stills them. Warren walks forward hesitantly, one hand on the hilt of her machete, and stops Murphy walking towards her with a hand on his shoulder, stepping in front of him.

“Cassandra? Can you understand me?” Warren’s voice is low and calm, like she’s talking to something feral. Cassandra wonders now more than ever what it is that she can’t remember.

Warren’s words draw the attention of the rest, carrying more inherent truth in them than Murphy’s. Addy spins around in a heartbeat, Doc raises his head from the engine and looks at her in stunned silence, and Tommy freezes, tension evident in his shoulders even from the small distance between them. Maybe she had hurt him, maybe he wouldn’t want to see her. When he raises his head after a long moment in which Cassandra considers fleeing, she can see his jaw is clenched tight and he looks pained as he looks at her.

“Of course I can,” is what Cassandra tries to say. The lack of talking for who knows how long, combined with dehydration causes it to come out as more of a croak. She swallows, clears her throat, and tries again, “Yes.”

Tommy stands and moves to stand next to Warren, the group gathering to face Cassandra, and she turns her attention back to Warren, who is still almost-subtly guarding everyone from her.

“How did you,” Warren pauses and glances at Murphy before continuing, “find us?”

“I don’t know,” Cassandra’s voice is a little rough, but at least it’s working now, “I just felt like this was the right way to go.”

Murphy smiles smugly at that, and Cassandra doesn’t know why. Some part deep inside of her is pleased to have made him smile, but most of her wants to hit him. She decides to ignore whatever part of her feels drawn to the strangely blue man. 

“Do you remember what happened to you?” Warren is still using her oddly careful voice, but she seems slightly more relaxed.

Cassandra shakes her head, “Last I remember, my leg was infected and we were in that lab. And then I woke up in a grave, and I have no idea what happened. I don’t need to eat, or drink, and zombies don’t seem to care about me anymore, and I…” She trails off and looks down at her improvised weapon in her hands, a broken pipe she’s clutching so tightly that she swears she can hear it creak, “I’m scared, Warren.”

With that, Warren releases her machete and closes the distance between them, placing her hand on Cassandra’s shoulder comfortingly. Cassandra looks up at her and can’t help but return Warren’s warm smile.

“We’ll figure it out, okay?” And that’s Warren’s normal voice, which is confident and comforting, and Cassandra nods, knowing that if anyone can figure out what happened to her, it’s this ragtag group of survivors.

Cassandra looks past Warren to the group, and the look of joy on Doc and Addy’s face is as warm and welcoming as a campfire and a fluffy blanket. The new guy looks mostly indifferent to the situation, which doesn’t surprise Cassandra given that they don’t know each other. Murphy looks pleased with himself, for reasons unknown to Cassandra, and Tommy looks at her as if she’s a unicorn or a mirage, something he can’t quite believe is real.

“Obviously it’s because-” Murphy begins some exasperated statement, but Warren rounds on him in heartbeat, cutting him off with a look and pointed words of her own.

“We don’t need to confuse her with speculation, now do we, Murphy?”

Cassandra knows that tone, the tone in which there’s no question that each suggestion is a command.

“Whatever. Come here, Cassandra,” Murphy grumbles and commands Cassandra as if it’s second nature to him to order her around.

Cassandra feels a strange compulsion to do what he says, but it’s nothing compared to her desire to slap him for having presumably kissed her when she was half dead, and for calling her like a dog now. She walks towards Murphy and sees a look of disappointment form on Tommy’s features. She’ll ask him about that later, but for now, Cassandra stops exactly one pace in front of a smugly smiling Murphy, smiles a vicious grin of her own up at him, and brings her hand up to slap him across the face with all of her not inconsiderable strength.

“I don’t know what you think there is between us, but keep your delusions to yourself. I’m not your fucking dog.”

Murphy gapes at her, clutching his cheek in shock, and she turns away from him in a heartbeat, silencing that strange urge to do what he says and walking away from him towards an unbelievably happy Tommy. Well, all of them have wanted to slap Murphy for a while, she’s not surprised that all of the group looks quite pleased with her actions, even Warren and the new guy have little smirks.

“You slapped him,” Tommy’s voice is laden with happy disbelief, as if he’d just found out that Santa was real.

“He had it coming,” Cassandra shrugs and smiles up at him.

Tommy reaches up and brushes her hair back from the right side of her face, dragging his thumb along her jaw and looking at her as if she’s not covered in weeks of dirt and sweat. Cassandra places her hand over his and turns her head, pressing her lips into his scarred palm. She hadn’t known if she would ever see him again, or if something had happened in that time that she couldn’t remember. She didn’t know if things would still be the same between them, and she desperately wants to pick up where they left off, sharing watches and trading secrets in the dark.

She doesn’t know if she expects him to pull away from her chaste and tender kiss, or if she expects him to kiss her passionately and potentially trigger memories of Sunshine that she’d rather not bring up. But Tommy being Tommy, he does neither of those. He wraps his free arm around Cassandra’s back and pulls her close to his chest in a tight hug. A hug that feels right and good, and of nothing other than Tommy. She returns it unreservedly, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his chest as he brushes his lips against the top of her head.

“I thought you were dead,” he whispers into her hair.

“Not that easily, I’d go out fighting.”

“I know you would.” His voice is strained when he says that, and Cassandra pulls away to look up at him and sees unshed tears in his eyes.

Tommy releases her and rubs at his eyes, erasing the pain she’d seen written on his features and replacing it with a smile. A smile that Cassandra had been unsure she’d ever see again, a little bit crooked but completely good. She returns it, and then is caught up in a group hug from Addy and Doc that she would normally protest, but not today. She vaguely notices Warren and the new guy having a hushed conversation with Murphy, but decides she doesn’t care, not when she’s been reunited with the people who mean so much to her.

They get the caravan up and running with more duct tape and some swearing on Doc’s part, during which time Addy fills Cassandra in on everything she missed. She wishes she had been there to care for Tommy when he’d gotten anthrax, given how much he had done for her when she’d had her leg infection. She would have stolen the medicine for him in a heartbeat. She is really glad she missed out on the zombaby, however, because from all descriptions that seems like it was a less than pleasant experience all around.

They climb into the caravan as the sun begins to set, all the gasoline they could scrounge up stowed onboard, and Warren takes the first shift driving, Murphy getting in the passenger seat and staring out the window glumly. The new guy claims one of the seats on a couch in the back, introducing himself as Vasquez before falling asleep in seconds. Addy immediately starts rummaging through the electronics, and Tommy offers to help, but she waves him away, telling him to get some sleep. He takes a seat on the other couch with a shrug, and Cassandra sits next to him as Doc goes to help Addy.

They sit there in silence for a while as night falls around them, and it almost reminds Cassandra of them being on watch together, even though she can hear Addy’s hushed instructions and the breathing of every other person in the vehicle. Cassandra moves closer to Tommy so that if he wants to, they can talk quietly enough that the other can’t hear them.

“I missed you,” Tommy says after several tense moments looking down at his hands.

“I missed you too.” It’s the easiest thing on the planet for Cassandra to admit.

“I still can’t believe you’re really back and okay. It’s just… It seems too good to be true.”

“Tommy, I-” Cassandra begins, but when she whispers Tommy’s pre-Z name, he looks up at her with such naked pain in his eyes that it stops whatever she was going to say.

“You remember my name?” His voice is shaky, and Cassandra nods.

“Of course I do, I would never forget that.”

Tommy’s silent for a long time, studying her face as if looking for further proof that she’s real. His hands uncurl from his lap, and he reaches up to her face again, this time brushing his fingers along the left side of her face, pausing at the base of her skull, where she oddly can’t feel the touch of his fingers anymore. She doesn’t care, though, because his thumb is resting behind her ear, and she’s finally back where she belongs, with people who will accept her and help her and care for her.

“Can I kiss you?” The words are the barest breath from Tommy, and Cassandra takes a moment to consider her answer. 

There’s so much that could go wrong, so much pain in her past that could come rushing back. But none of those men, none of her marks had ever asked her permission, had ever held her face so gently and looked at her like she was a dream. None of them had ever been Tommy.

Cassandra nods, and Tommy’s moves towards her slowly, hesitantly, and she remembers him confessing long ago that he’d only ever kissed one girl. Cassandra smiles and reaches her own hand up, wrapping it around the back of his neck and into his hair, pulling him closer and pressing their lips together gently. He’s obviously unskilled, not incredibly responsive, but also not attempting to push himself on her. The kiss is simple, short, sweet, a confirmation for the both of them that this is real.

When they part, Tommy smiles at her, and Cassandra moves even closer, leaning on his chest and allowing him to wrap his arms around her. They fall asleep like that, still uncertain of the past and the future, but entirely content in the present. And really, in the apocalypse, that’s all you can wish for.

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the second day of Ficmas! I’m uploading 12 brand new one shots for y'all to enjoy (3/day, one for each of my major fandoms each day from the 21st to the 24th)
> 
> I need Cassandra to be alive, so this is a canon divergent fix-it and is canon as far as I’m concerned (even if she never comes back, once the show’s over, no one can prove to me that she didn’t survive that and just live happily in the forest forever)
> 
> [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) is the best editor on the planet and I love her so much for editing all these for me!
> 
> Come spend the holidays with me [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And thank in advance for reading/commenting/leaving kudos <3


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